From ice cream to exercise, too much of a good thing can make people sick. And when people take too much medicine, the effect can be dangerous. That’s why doctors are concerned about the findings of a new survey.

Liquid medicines can be tricky to measure correctly. Doctors recommend measuring drugs with tools such as medicine droppers and oral syringes. They strongly prefer the use of...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Students are used to taking science tests in school. Every two years the National Science Foundation and other agencies also test a cross-section of American adults on science. And their latest scores have just come out. They show those adults generally get a passing grade. Not a great grade, mind you. It appears some adults still have a lot to learn.

For a planet that hasn’t technically been discovered yet, Planet Nine is generating a lot of buzz. Astronomers have not yet found a new planet orbiting the sun. Yet some remote icy bodies are dropping clues that a giant orb may be lurking on the fringes of the solar system.

Six hunks of ice in the debris field beyond Neptune travel on orbits that are aligned with one another. Planetary...

Cover your mouth when you cough, wash your hands … don’t say bad things about math? Psychology researchers have known for years that a fear of math can be contagious. They’ve shown that children can pick up negative attitudes about math from teachers. Now they’ve found another source of “math anxiety”: parents.

Researchers studied 438 first- and second-graders and their families. Before...

At 3:20 a.m. on August 24, 2014 — not quite a year ago — a strong earthquake rocked the northern California town of Napa. It sparked fires. Historic buildings crumbled. And more than 200 people were hurt. This region had not experienced ground shaking that powerful in nearly a quarter-century.

Less than one minute later, about 38 kilometers (24 miles) south of the Napa quake’s...

Eating more mozzarella cheese shouldn’t make engineering schools hand out more diplomas. Yet between 2000 and 2009, the more mozzarella that Americans downed, the more doctorates in civil engineering that U.S. universities awarded. Over a 10-year period, as levels of one went up, so did the other. The two showed a strong positive correlation. Yet almost certainly this happened by coincidence....

When it came to creating her own computer game, 13-year-old Kristyna Bednářová started from Scratch.

Scratch is a free computer programming language created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Students around the world — including Kristyna, who lives in the Czech Republic — use the MIT language to create games, stories and animations. “I call it ‘School to Play,’”...

There’s so much snow in the movie Frozen that the cold white stuff might as well be the star of the animated film. It falls, flies, piles and melts. Snow sprays through the air as Anna and Kristoff cling to a reindeer-pulled sleigh, barely escaping a pack of snarling wolves. Snow dances in the air as Elsa uses her special powers to build an icy fortress on a lonely mountain. The movie even...

The best poker player in the world doesn't have a poker face. In fact — it has no face at all.

The new poker expert is an algorithm (AL-go-RITH-em), or problem-solving program. Called Cepheus, it has solved one form of this card game. “Solved,” in this case, means the program knows the game well enough to win against any human.